Nir Rosen - Aftermath

“The security situation improved somewhat. There was significant improvement to the national police as we more effectively partnered with them down to platoon level. Additionally, the commander was replaced and we arrested several officers that we think were the primary source of corruption in the battalion. Over time they became much more competent, professional in their behavior, and successful in their operations. They also began gaining the trust of the local population.

“The biggest challenge I faced was the sectarian nature of the Shiite-dominated local government structures. They had significant influence over the decisions about resource allocation and controlling essential services like benzene, propane, and kerosene distribution, and medical clinic and school re-sourcing. They gave priority to the Shiite neighborhoods and neglected the Sunni neighborhoods. This made it very difficult to build legitimacy in the eyes of the Sunnis who were being marginalized by their local government. In general, the Shiites, in conjunction with the national police, would attempt to displace Sunnis from their homes and then take physical control of the vacant house. In response, the Sunnis would defend their homes or counterattack into Shiite areas. I never sensed the Sunnis were trying to expand; it was the Shiites that were trying to take control of more area.”

Something I was told by Capt. Jim Keirsey, who served in East Rashid between October 2006 and December 2007, confirmed the endemic sectarianism of the Iraqi Security Forces. “A large number of the national police brigade and battalion charged with securing the population of Dora persecuted the population,” Keirsey said. “They were often very antagonistic toward the population of Dora. It became a vicious cycle. Extremists within Dora would attack Shiite residents to drive them out. The national police would execute reprisal detentions or allow Shiite extremists to attack Sunnis in Dora. Or they would detain Sunnis from Dora outside of the community. Dora Sunni extremists would then seek additional reprisals, perhaps capturing a passing taxi driver and beating him near death. Then the national police, enraged, would charge into the mahala en masse with little fire discipline, terrorizing the populace.”

As I walked the desolate streets in December 2007, it was hard to know if things were improving. But with few killings occurring in Dora, the conflict seemed frozen in place. A man and his daughter walked hurriedly by. I asked them why the area was empty. “It’s a good neighborhood,” they assured me. “People left because there is no electricity.” In another home I found a man shaving a friend. They told me there had not been electricity in the area for a year and a half. The Mahdi Army controlled the electrical station in the area, they explained. “People will come back when electricity comes back,” they said. “We’re afraid to go out at night.” The Mahdi Army fired mortars at this area from the nearby Shiite neighborhood of Abu Dshir, people told me, and launched attacks from there, engaging Al Qaeda in firefights in Dora. I asked one man why he had not fled like everybody else. “Where will I go?” he asked me. Many Shiite homes in Dora were burned down, to prevent the owners from ever returning. Poor Sunnis who were expelled from Hurriya and Shaab or other poor Shiite areas had moved into the homes of better-off Shiites who had been expelled from well-to-do Sunni areas such as Dora, Ghazaliya, and Amriya.

Osama ran three hundred Iraqi Security Volunteers but resented the restrictions placed on him by the Americans. In Seidiya, Adhamiya, Amriya, Ghazaliya, and other volatile Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, ISVs were allowed to patrol freely and carry heavy-caliber machine guns. “We use our own guns,” Osama told me. “The Americans didn’t give us anything.” Osama had a contract to provide a certain number of men at ten dollars per day. He was paid every other week, and he paid his men and provided uniforms and whatever else they might need.

“The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money,” Adam Sperry told me when I visited his office in Forward Operating Base Falcon. A bright twenty-three-year-old who majored in creative writing in college, Sperry was an Army intelligence officer from the Second Squadron, Second Cavalry Regiment. Capt. Travis Cox, his colleague, explained to me that at higher levels a lot of money and time was being spent trying to figure out how to transition the ISVs into other jobs. “To a large extent they are former insurgents,” Cox admitted.

The 2-2 SCR was patrolling Osama’s area in Dora when I visited. The unit’s Major Garrett had to figure out what to do with all these militiamen. He placed his hopes on vocational training centers that offered instruction in automotive repair, carpentry, blacksmithing, electricity repair, and English. But adults who were part of a militia were not likely to want to abandon their weapons. “At the end of the day they want a legitimate living,” Garrett told me. “That’s why they’re joining the ISVs.” I didn’t think anybody was working for a paltry ten dollars per day merely for a legitimate living. These were men who had fought the American occupation as well as the Shiites of Iraq. They had not done so for profit, as the Americans insisted. “The ideological fight, forget about it,” Captain Dehart, the unit’s senior intelligence officer, said when I suggested this to him. “We bought into it too much. It’s money and power.” Peace would come to Iraq “if they just realized they would make more money with us through construction contracts than fighting us.”

In Dora the Americans were the government, building electrical power stations because the Shiite-dominated government didn’t care about supplying electricity or other services to Sunnis. The 2-2 SCR was spending thirty-two million dollars on construction contracts signed with Iraqis and on salaries for Sunni militiamen they hired to be ISVs. They spent twelve million dollars alone building walls around neighborhoods. Sperry complained that American counterinsurgency strategy “is to spend millions of dollars and build walls to make Iraqis more divided than they already are.” But his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Reineke, felt very strongly about building walls around neighborhoods and didn’t care if some people were cut off as a result. He was frustrated that a wall he was paying local contractors to build around Mahala 860 was taking too long. The wall was meant to keep Al Qaeda fighters out and cut off arms smuggling routes. Some locals left outside were upset that they were not being included inside the walls. Often it seemed as if the American strategy was merely to buy Iraqis off temporarily, and they distributed “microgrants” of three thousand dollars to all the shop owners in their area.

I WONDERED what would happen when this massive influx of American money stopped pouring in. Would the Iraqi state become a bribing machine? Would the ruling Shiites even want to pay Sunnis whom they had been trying to exterminate until recently? Sunnis they believed had been trying to kill them? The British occupation of Iraq in the early twentieth century was described as “colonialism on the cheap.” The British did not spend much money on the occupation, and relied on the use of airpower as an alternative to a large standing army. The British bribed tribes and tried to mold the political system in a way that benefited their local allies and enriched them, turning them into feudal lords. This was nothing compared to the billions of dollars the Americans were throwing into Iraq. Adding up all the men employed by the Interior Ministry, the Defense Ministry, the other security branches, the Awakening militiamen, and others working for private security companies that contracted with the American departments of State or Defense, there were more than a million Iraqi men in the security sector. This was more than Saddam had. But for the Americans, spending billions of dollars bribing Iraqis was a pittance compared to how much they spent per year just keeping their military in Iraq or the cost of repairing their damaged vehicles, let alone the cost of injured soldiers. But loyalty that can be purchased is by its nature fickle. Would these maneuvers lead to a real or stable political process in Iraq?